The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday urged Beijing to correct its “historical mistake” of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the massacre, which began overnight on June 3, 1989, and continued through June 4 to brutally crush tens of thousands of students, workers and others who had been protesting in and around the square, calling for democracy, free speech and a free press.
For 30 years, the Chinese government has lacked the courage to reflect on the historical significance of the June Fourth Incident, choosing instead to “block information, distort the truth and attempt to cover up its mistakes and the events of 1989,” the council said in a statement.
Photo: CNA
China should face its historical mistakes, apologize and correct the incident so that the victims of the incident may “rest in peace,” it said.
Taiwan would continue to “lead the way” for the democratization of China, and support China’s move to democracy “in all manner of ways,” it said.
Hopefully, people in Taiwan and abroad would not forget the history and spirit of June 4, the council said, adding that “one day, the dawn of democracy will eventually come.”
The council also called on China to immediately release Taiwanese human rights advocate Lee Ming-che (李明哲), who is serving a five-year prison sentence in Hunan Province for “subversion of state power.”
Reflecting on Tiananmen, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that it was a shame that although China’s economic development has improved over the past few years, human rights there are still limited.
Speaking to a group of overseas democracy activists at the Presidential Office in Taipei, Tsai drew comparisons between today’s 30th anniversary of the massacre and the 40th anniversary of the Kaohsiung Incident, saying the two events were of crucial historic significance.
The Kaohsiung Incident was a crackdown by the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) authoritarian government on a demonstration organized by Formosa Magazine and its publisher — Legislator Huang Shin-chieh (黃信介) — and other pro-democracy advocates on Dec. 10, 1979, in Kaohsiung.
Taiwan’s democratization was fraught with difficulty, she said as she pointed to a photograph of Presidential Office Secretary-General Chen Chu (陳菊) when she was on trial in a military court for her role in the Kaohsiung Incident.
The direction and pace of development in Taiwan and China diverged after their respective incidents, with Taiwan firmly taking the path of democracy and freedom, while human rights and freedom have been severely constrained in China, Tsai said.
Taiwan will defend the values of democracy, and cares about the development of democracy and human rights in China, which are universal values that she hopes China would pursue, she said.
Additional reporting by Su Yung-yao, CNA and Reuters
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS